Monday, March 29, 2010

Book Review: The Entire Percy Jackson Series

Blech. Erp. Urgh. Gurgle. Can I write any more yucky stomach noises to summarize my love for the Percy Jackson books?

I'm a YA fiction fan. Have been since I was a kid. I recently went back to visit some old favorites, and was widely disappointed. The Black Cauldron? Sexist and predictable. The Dark is Rising? Similar, but less trite. Wizard of Earthsea? Well, that series is actually full of winners. I will keep them prominently displayed to tempt my children into great reads.

The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has caught fire lately. My daughter's teacher read book 1 to the class. She's loving them so much, she'll stay up until 10 at night to read. She'll grab one title, and her best friend will grab another, and they'll sit in the same room and read. "I like it already," I'm thinking. Then I picked one up as an airplane read.

The book is written about a 12 year-old, just as a 12 year-old would write it. It's supposedly a real-time memoir, which is the book's conceit. And Rick Riordan unfortunately does a wonderful job of capturing the cliched, sarcastic writing of a 12 year-old. Blech.

The issue I have is not the writing style (though that's annoying). It's that the story is also a story from a 12 year-old. I've read the first 3 books. Origin for each book: New York. Keeps the story grounded, sure. Hogwarts. I get it. OK. Destination for book 1: LA. book 2: Bermuda triangle book 3: San Francisco. There are 30-50 pages of setup, then the kids go on a cross-country travel. They get miraculous help at exactly the right time, despite dangerous monsters. From the tiny sneak peek at book 4 that my daughter gave me, book 4 is likewise a NY to west coast trip. I really don't care what monsters they'll meet and defeat next. I want to care about the characters (see my review of The Host) but I just can't. They are unlovable.

I just can't describe the yuckiness here. Vocab is repetitive, phrasing is too predictable. "Characters" is too large a compliment for the names in these books. Characters they are not - they are caricatures. Riordan makes a character untrustworthy and thinks that makes them deep. Good people are good. The camp director makes a show of not liking them but helps out when needed. The enemies are described too powerfully, but fail terribly battling teenagers. It's all just sooooo predictable. I'll slog through them. Just book 4 and 5, and then I'll have to wait a year or 2 for book 6, I hope.

A Wrinkle in Time awaits. That's worth the slog, if we can build some reading momentum. Maybe Earthsea after that. Or Pern. Hmmm....